The French Government has conferred on him the rare honour of two Knighthoods: the Knighthoodof Academic Palms of the Ministry of Education, one of the oldest civilian honours in the world; andthe Knighthood of Arts and Letters of the Ministry of Culture. According to JMG Le Clézio, 2008Nobel laureate in literature, “His honour is so satisfying because it rewards the work of someonewho has built bridges between cultures.” In the words of Theodore Zeldin: “He demonstrates howliterature does more than open the door into unfamiliar civilisations. His mastery of three differentliteratures gives him a unique capacity to produce original perspectives. He is a rare bird, with arange of interests and knowledge seldom found in academia or anywhere else.”B.A. from St. Xavier’s College; M.A. from Calcutta University; Ph.D. from Jadavpur University.Teacher Fellow at Jadavpur University in 1994-95. Former Director of Embassy of France in NewDelhi, and former Vice-Chancellor, Rabindra Bharati University, he has lectured at the universitiesof Paris-Sorbonne, Oxford, Manchester, Warwick, Edinburgh, Worcester and Avignon; at theJournées internationales Romain Rolland in Vézelay, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon,Académie des Belles Lettres et des Sciences, La Rochelle, France, the Mahatma Gandhi Institute,Mauritius and the Institute of European Studies, Belgrade. He delivered the inaugural address andPlenary Session lectures at Confluences, the Salon du Livre in Mauritius in 2013 and 2014, and thekeynote at the sesquicentenary Romain Rolland conference at the University of Paris-Sorbonne inJune 2015. He has worked as Associate Director at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris in2009 and 2014.His books include: Where the Dreams Cross: T S Eliot and French Poetry (2000, Macmillan,2011); The Tower and the Sea: Romain Rolland-Kalidas Nag Correspondence 1922-1938 (1996,Sahitya Akademi 2010); Remembering Sartre (Co-edited, 2007); Time Space Text: MappingCultural Paradigms (Co-edited, 2008); La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims (1990); Robin Wood’s The ApuTrilogy; André Gide’s Strait is the Gate (Sahitya Akademi, 1996); Flaubert’s Dictionary ofStupidity (2000); Victor Hugo: A Biography (2003); Between the Centre and theAbsence (2003); Chilekothar Unmadini (2007); Garho Sankher Khonje (2011); Anya Jalbatash,Anya Dheu: A Collection of Twentienth Century French Poetry (2010); Aina Bhangte Bhangte: ABook of Conversations with R. K. Dasgupta, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Badal Sircar, Mrinal Sen, SankhaGhosh, Dipendu Chakrabarty, Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak (2011) Surer Bandhone: RabindranatherSange (2016) and Ghumer Darja Thele (2016), a collection of essays on world literature. His latestwork is Bridging East and West: Rabindranath Tagore and Romain Rolland Correspondence 1919-1940, Oxford University Press (2018).